Gov. Abigail Spanberger signed legislation Friday allowing the utility giant to hide its rapidly expanding distribution network underground, ensuring Northern Virginia's data centers remain fully powered as local temperatures breach historical maximums. The bills aim to shield the physical infrastructure from the climate consequences of its own carbon load.
Gov. Spanberger’s signature on the legislation, sponsored by Senate President Pro Tem Louise Lucas and Del. Destiny LeVere Bolling, greenlights Dominion Energy to spend nearly a million dollars per mile to trench local distribution lines. The initiative is officially framed as a grid reliability measure, meant to harden critical infrastructure against the intensifying storms, floods, and wildfires directly exacerbated by the utility’s ongoing natural gas buildout for the tech industry.
We are deeply committed to ensuring that as we burn through the state's remaining carbon budget to support artificial intelligence, the physical cables doing the work remain aesthetically pleasing and impervious to the resulting super-storms.
Virginia’s PJM interconnection queue is currently dominated by data centers, which require massive, uninterrupted baseload power to cool server racks. To meet this demand, Dominion has already walked back its net-zero pledges and proposed new fossil fuel generation, citing the unavoidable necessity of keeping the cloud online. The newly signed legislation allows Dominion to incorporate the $900,000-a-mile burial costs into its planning, ensuring the grid remains functional even as the surface world becomes increasingly hostile to human habitation.
The State Corporation Commission will now begin the rulemaking process to determine exactly how much of these infrastructure costs will be assigned to the data centers versus residential ratepayers. The commission's final regulatory framework is expected in late 2025, roughly coinciding with the release of the IPCC's next synthesis report and the beginning of what NOAA projects will be another unprecedented Atlantic hurricane season.